It is an old saying that “time is the biggest healer”. No matter how thick is the shadow of the black clouds over our lives, we still have to move on.

Recently, a study done by Brunel University researchers have found that the level of happiness in our lives remains neutral and same, with occasional fluctuation while we get exposed to good as well bad events. The study took a course of 20-year to reach to this conclusion. A volunteer group of Germans, which aged between 20 to 60 at the start of the study; were then regularly kept under concentration for two decades, where they were questioned and told to grade their own happiness.

The results of the study were published in the latest issue of Economic Journal. The researchers have found out that sadness and grief are temporary. People who suffer widowhood, divorce or any such traumatic event might undergo a brief period of depression, but then soon recover back to their normal self. Though the research also points out that when someone loses a job, he/she may remain depressed for a longer period of life.

Similarly level of happiness too tends to remain the same throughout the life. The joy which people experience at marriage or child birth too disappears after a few years.

Dr Yannis Georgellis, co-author and senior lecturer in economics at Brunel University, said, “ It’s consistent with other findings that people recover from negative events very quickly - there was some literature on people who became paraplegic, who, when interviewed a few years later, had similar levels of happiness to those who had not been affected this way.” He further added that there had been studies on the lottery winners too, who no longer are extremely happy as they were when they won it, but display a normal basic level of happiness.

The researchers compared the level of happiness with a thermostat spring which they called “thermostat of happiness”. They said that when a big event-whether it be positive or negative- happens in our lives, the spring stretches for a while, but soon return back to its normal position.

Thus the study emphasizes that humans have the ability to move on and recover from events as the time takes them through different experience of life.